Sound of My Voice Infiltrates Time-Traveler’s Creepy Cult

Talk about a cliffhanger.

By the time the credits roll for the cleverly staged, intense The Sound of My Voice, it’s clear the movie-making team has more in store for us than a single feature film. The movie tells the story of a couple that infiltrates a cult, and ends with a show-stopper that would make J.J. Abrams proud.

Unfortunately, there’s no telling when the next episode of this engaging and mysterious tale will be ready … if it gets made at all.

The Sound of My Voice follows Peter and Lorna, a hipster Los Angeles couple hoping to launch their documentary filmmaking careers by becoming followers of Maggie (played by producer/co-writer Brit Marling), an ethereal beauty with a ruthless edge. Maggie claims to have traveled back in time, from 2054, to recruit and train an army for a coming civil war. Peter and Lorna are determined to unmask her as a fraud, and submit to strange demands — as in the scene above, where they must shower themselves before being bound and blindfolded — in order to meet the cult leader.

Brit Marling stars in The Sound of My Voice.Photo courtesy Still Water Films

Director/co-writer Zal Batmanglij, who said he made the film for “considerably under $500,000,” says he and Marling completed an outline for a three-film series, with the final two parts yet to be filmed.

“This is not Lost,” Batmanglij told Wired.com in a phone interview. “We planned out every detail, and know exactly where the story goes, whether we finish it as a trilogy or a TV or internet series. There is an end point we will reach.”

Batmanglij said he enjoyed watching the audience reaction to his movie when it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival this week, but he’d be interested in taking the project online so viewers could roll their own private screenings.

“Watching it on their laptops on their beds, it’d be haunting and intimate,” he said. “So if push comes to shove, we’ll finish it and release it on the internet.”

The Sound of My Voice also establishes Marling as a rising star of geek culture. A Daryl Hannah lookalike, she wrote, produced and starred in a second Sundance 2011 sci-fi breakout, Another Earth, a smart and twisty film about a girl who seeks escape, with a trip to a new planet, and finds forgiveness. That film was purchased by Fox Searchlight for between $1.5 million and $2 million and will be released this year.